


the beast rises (and earns his ending)

by typewriter_in_galaxy



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe, Beauty and the Beast Elements, Blood, Canon-Typical Violence, F/M, Gargoyles, Knights of Ren - Freeform, Let's Go To The Movies Fic Exchange, M/M, Magic, Memory Loss, Minor Character Death, Snalps, magic instead of the force, only in the first chapter i promise
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-08-18
Updated: 2020-08-18
Packaged: 2021-03-05 22:48:13
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,581
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25973155
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/typewriter_in_galaxy/pseuds/typewriter_in_galaxy
Relationships: Knights of Ren & Kylo Ren, Leia Organa/Han Solo, Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren, Sheev Palpatine/Snoke
Comments: 3
Kudos: 3
Collections: Let's Go to the Movies - Reylo Readers & Writers Prompt Exchange





	the beast rises (and earns his ending)

To begin a fairytale, one should sprinkle someone charisma in; a dashing prince, a poor yet pretty farm girl, a captivating trait or action. My dear reader will have to forgive me, for there is no such person to pick the yarn and spin our story with. The man we follow now, crossing a storm with his skeletal horse and cloak, has schemed and deceived, destroyed and killed, without dirtying his hands once; he deserves all the contempt you can conjure, yet he has never done anything monumental. As for why I didn’t find someone else to dazzle you with, I confess there is none; all I offer you is selfish people, though in that regard, none of them competes with the man who set everything in motion.

To say he’s old would be a gross understatement; this creature has survived three generations and aspires to torment three more. His horse gallops soundlessly in the ground’s snow coat; it eats up distance three times faster than any other of its kind, but that doesn’t help when a metal gate materializes amidst the swirling storm. The horse crashes and dissolves into black dust whereas the man flies backwards and lands in a heap of cloak and snow.

With groans lost to the howling wind, his joints pull him to stand and hobble towards the gate. It cracks open at the touch of his knobby hand, revealing a garden bathed in snow yet untouched by the storm. Beneath his hood, a wrinkly frown forms; he trots on slowly, muttering to himself. The kind of magic upholding this place is similar to the one he breathes and schemes with; therefore he treads the garden with fear, sure that it’s riddled with traps.

In a way, he’s right; there are three points of power in the estate, one amidst the snow-veiled flowers and two hiding in the palace he approaches. (He’ll soon disturb them all.) An honest man would knock at the central doors to plead for their owner’s hospitality; but the cloaked creature finds some sort of odious backdoor to pry open and slips down an endless set of stairs, tracing the wall with yellowed fingertips and chanting under his breath. He crosses halls and takes left turns into several corridors with such certainty, as if someone walks ahead of him, guiding him.

Underneath his hood, drops of sweat catch on his forehead’s wrinkles; we have to assume they’re born of worry, because the palace’s underground is colder than the eye of the storm outside. He collapses on the threshold of a barred door, heaving such desperate breaths that if it were any other man, I’d say he’s crying.

It takes him several moments to stand up again, but once he touches the lock, the bars vanish (not unlike his horse did) and he steps inside. The room permeates the stench of decay; it slaps the old, old man so viciously that he nearly fails to see what lies ahead of him, staring him right in his sunken eyes. When the two creature’s stares meet, the cloaked man falls to his knees – which makes no sense, since he knew what awaited him from the moment he touched the gate, sensed his creation’s pulse in the garden and in the castle’s old stones.

They make a truly astonishing picture, one every historian would kill to portray: the dual-edged scepter, Palpatine or Darth Sidious, the man to whom the whole world once bowed to, is kneeling on the dusty floor, his tear-stained face looking up to Snoke, a creature who rose to power half a century ago, but disappeared at the peak of his power. The latter is seated on a throne carved out of the wall’s stones; a blue blade bisects his torso, yet no blood stains his robes. His hands and neck and face are coated by an odious sort of skin that rots without diminishing; that and the scar running across his skull rob him of any illusion of humanlike countenance.

And yet, Palpatine recognizes the eyes, as striking blue as they were when that handsome aristocrat laughed and rejected his advances, and even more clear than they were when they gazed upon him for the first time, in the face of his third, perfect clone, right after he named him Snoke, right before the creature smiled and kissed him. These eyes are now witnesses of the husk he’s become; they remember, no doubt, the man –and the lover- Sheev used to be; and they smile still. That is what breaks him beyond repair.

Snoke’s cracked remnants of a mouth move, sending tremors through his kneeling master’s body. “I have so longed to see you once more, before I depart.” Harder sobs echo in the tiny room. “No, it must be so. My existence had always been finite, unlike yours. But I longed to see you, and here you are.” Snoke heaves a breath; blood starts trickling from his torso at last. “Will you kiss me goodbye? There will be no me afterwards to reminisce, but do it all the same.” Palpatine eyes the creature’s effort to smile warily, but he stands up to comply, cups the decaying face in his hands (which are also decaying, albeit slower) and catches the blue of these eyes before leaning in.

The moment their lips touch, he realizes the betrayal; anger courses through him just as pride swells in his barren chest. He doesn’t pull back, he doesn’t want to; all he had wished for ever since his creature blinked up at the world was for them to burn together, burn bright and dissolve in two identical heaps of dust and scatter. The apprentice, the progeny has won; the progenitor fulfilled his duty; the world falls into chaos, the simplest face of order; the Rule of Two reins their destruction and dies with them.

Snoke pulls back first, mirth in his eyes and what would be the corner of his lips. “You are finite now, Master. You failed to make me as you; I succeed to make you as me. You will come with me.” Palpatine wants to answer, to nod at least; but his creation dissolves before he can do either. A fitting end for them.

The cloaked man runs through the palace’s underground, tears through the garden and screams without realizing he does so; he only comes to his senses when a thorn pierces his thumb. The rosetree that stung him rustles its leaves in a greeting. Its blue blossoms contrast magnificently with its dark wood and the snowy landscape. He cuts one and cradles it in his palms, his tears freezing.

The petals blacken at his touch; when the whole blossom darkens, two set of claws pierce his back. He is raised a couple inches from the ground, thrown ten feet further on the snow, and slashed across his torso before he can even beg for mercy. He pleads and pleads while he accumulates more cuts and then he’s turned on his back, face to face with a beast that seemed to be born of the darkest nightmares.

“No mercy will be granted upon thieves like yourself.” The words are growled out of a mouth rife with sharp teeth; the crimson eyes above it banish any hope for forgiveness. “You came into my garden, trespassed my castle and now you steal my most prized possession, my last streak of humanity. My flowers. You will pay for it with your blood.”

Palpatine screams. “Spare me! There must be another way; we can come to an agreement!”

The beast raised one eyebrow. “You’d rather someone else of your blood pay for your sins?”

Palpatine rejoices in the opportunity to save himself. “Oh, yes! There is one descendant of mine alive, go and take her! I keep her in my old estate; her name is Rey Palpatine and she will pay just fine. You can surely get a hold of her,” Palpatine says, eyeing the large wings, made of leather and black feathers. He fails to notice the flash of recognition running across the beast’s features, or the way his eyes shift to a very human amber at the sound of “Rey”. He looks up in time to see only the beast glaring at him with bared teeth.

“Oh, I will get a hold of her,” he drawls, a claw closing around the old man’s neck. “But you have to pay me still,” the beast says with a smile, starting to draw blood. The man beneath him, however, goes rigid before he can slit his throat and extract revenge. Did Darth Sidious, far-seeing and paranoid as everyone who served him portrayed him to be, prepare a certain magic reaction to happen in his body in cases of extreme danger, so that his enemies wouldn’t catch him alive? Was the man who just lost the closest thing he’s ever had to a lover –not to mention his immortality, after Snoke cut his ties to his string of wrinkled clones– simply too weak to sustain the stress of another threat? We shall never know what killed Sheev Palpatine, Darth Sidious, the master puppeteer. All we have for certain is his corpse, and a raging beast on top of him.

The beast, the one we shall follow now, is soon joined by his winged companions; together they set of to find Rey, who is now under a debt of blood and our beast’s fragile hope to regain his humanity.


End file.
